Point of Sale terminals have typically been utilized to maintain a real-time running status of inventory, sales activity and price changes. However, in recent years, these Point of Sale terminals have also been utilized to track information regarding revenue sharing aspects of certain merchandise in which more than one party has an interest.
One example of a revenue sharing scheme is that involved with respect to the renting of home Videos. In the home video renting market, a vendor purchases from a supplier videotapes for select programs which he then rents. When the videotapes are received, the vendor places a bar code on the videos, codes this bar code into his system, and then places it on a shelf. When a customer rents the video, the bar code on the video is scanned, and the status of the video altered within the local database to indicate that it has been rented. When it is returned, it is then scanned again to place it back into the rent inventory. The system provides a vendor with knowledge of the number of tapes that are in his rent inventory, the number of tapes that are rented and the number of tapes that are overdue and the individuals that have these tapes. This allows the vendor to assess the type of traffic that he has with respect to particular videos, etc.
In conventional marketing schemes with respect to video rentals, the vendor must incur considerable expense in renting particular videos. For example, the cost of the video may be as much as twenty times the single rental rate for the video. If a video rents for $3.00, the purchase price might be as high as $60.00. Therefore, the vendor must rent the video a minimum of twenty times to break even. Of course, with a very popular program, the vendor can rent this well over one hundred times, if not more. The problem exists with respect to a program that may have very poor reception in the public once the video has been placed on the shelf and into the rent inventory. Unfortunately, the vendor cannot assess the public's reception of the program until it is on the shelf. As such, the vendor may have incurred significant costs and is therefore reluctant to place significant investments into the actual purchase of tapes to place into the rent inventory. Of course, the popularity of a given program is relatively short and it is difficult to order additional videotapes to meet a given demand, as this demand can drop off very rapidly.
With revenue sharing schemes, the supplier can provide to the vendor tapes at a much reduced cost, since the actual production costs of the videotape is relatively low compared to the wholesale cost. Vendors can therefore place more videotapes into their rent inventories and the suppliers can insure that the maximum number of videotapes for a popular program are in the rent inventory.
A disadvantage to revenue sharing systems is that it is difficult for a supplier that has an interest in the revenue sharing to monitor traffic at a vendor to insure that they are getting their proper portion of the revenue. Additionally, most vendors have a standard Point of Sale terminal that "locks" them in to a given system which may not be compatible with different suppliers. The reason for this is that different suppliers use different bar codes or coding techniques, different serial numbers, etc. than would a vendor. This situation is further exacerbated by the fact that most Point of Sale terminals cannot accommodate a revenue sharing scheme without significantly rewriting the software and providing communications. One solution to this problem has been to provide an intercept box that is disposed between the Point of Sale terminal and the printer to intercept information that is transferred to the printer. By examining the fields, in the print output information can be gleaned as to what transactions have occurred. This information then can be converted into a second database and stored locally or transferred to a remote location. However, this system requires completely separate hardware and is subject to whether a printout has been ordered for a given transaction.